I was introduced to a really interesting subject this week. Did you know that the meaty flavor and texture of the Impossible Burger is actually a protein complex made using a somewhat new technology – Precision Fermentation?
Precision Fermentation Vats at The Good Food Institute
This technology has apparently been around now for about 40 years, mainly for the production of insulin. In the 1980’s some smart microbiologists and organic chemists at Genentech came up with a process for making recombinant insulin using E. Coli. Yes, this is the same bacteria that ends up in chicken and beef and causes people to get sick. However, this particular bacterium is sort of the poster child for the ability to manipulate its genes to make all sorts of things. Genentech started off with insulin and brought the cost of this critical hormone for diabetic down to where people with this disease could get it readily and manage their blood sugar effectively. Then in 1990 Pfizer used the same technology to make an enzyme in rennet, chymosin, which is what is required in the cheese making process. Rennet used to be extracted from the stomachs of lambs, calves slaughtered for veal, etc. to get the chymosin needed to make cheese. Once Pfizer brought precision fermentation derived chymosin onto the market at a lower cost than that extracted from animals, the cheese making industry transitioned almost immediately to the bio-derived version and now nearly all cheese making uses precision fermented chymosin (1).
Sorry about the microbiology lesson here, but I do have to provide some explanation of what is meant by “Precision Fermentation”. Man has been fermenting foods since about 6000 BC, so fermentation itself isn’t new. It is basically using a microbe, in the case of beer and wine that is yeast, and using the yeast to break down some of the more complex sugars and other organic compounds in food into simpler compounds. In the case of beer and wine production, the strains of yeast that are used, which have been perfected over the centuries to give beer and wine their taste, have not been modified in the laboratory to change their DNA. Once microbiologists had the capacity to alter the DNA of microbes in test tubes, what is called Precision Fermentation got its start. And recently, since about the turn of the millennium, microbiologists have been able to have yeast-like microbes turn out whatever proteins or flavor compounds or oils they want to turn out by just modifying the genome of a microbe to express a gene that makes whatever they want that microbe to make.
To tie this to composites, what these microbiologists have been able to create with their precision fermentation process is an oil that is a direct replacement for palm oil. This is a good thing in and of itself. Palm oil is the predominant oil in food products (mostly processed foods), lotions and creams for skin, and a number of other things. In fact it is a $74 billion a year industry. The problem is that to get that much palm oil, which is only able to be harvested from palm trees in the tropics, is to burn down the rainforests in the Amazon and in equatorial Africa to plant enormous palm plantations. So, palm oil itself and the industry that produces has become one of the larger actors in putting CO2 in our atmosphere. And our large carbon sinks in the tropics are disappearing because of the palm oil industry. So, this represents double trouble for our climate.
The composite material tie is that the conversion of palm oil to epoxy resin has been demonstrated (2). And the resin that has been demonstrated using palm oil is inherently recyclable at the end of life of the composite.
Epoxy from Palm Oil - From the American Chemical Society
Precision fermentation of waste plant sugars to make palm oil and then convert it to recyclable epoxy resin appears to me to be a viable alternative to petroleum based epoxies and also plant oil based epoxies. Since the precision fermentation product is pure and does not have any other plant organics mixed in with it, it should be much easier for an epoxy resin producer to control chemistry and quality of their epoxy resins.
Fortunately, the sugars or long chain polysaccharides that are classed as sugars are all digestible by these bacteria. That is, as long as the bacteria are tailored to use the particular available long chain polysaccharide as a sugar and break it down into the product that the microbiologist wants as an end product.
One more thing that precision fermentation can produce is another very long chain polysaccharide that I have talked about quite a bit in this newsletter is cellulose. In addition to all of the proteins, oils, and other organics that can be made using precision fermentation, the production of cellulose fibers using this process has also been demonstrated. All of this begs the question of course about the potential production of both acrylonitrile and bisphenol-A using precision fermentation.
In any case, there are two companies that have stood up production facilities for making palm oil using precision fermentation. One here in the US is C16 Biosciences (3) in New York. This company was founded as a biotech startup by some MIT grads, and one of their initial products was palm oil from their precision fermentation process. They have this scaled up now to the point that they are making metric tons of palm oil in 50,000 liter tanks. They have initially targeted the cosmetics industry because aside from the food industry these folks are the highest tonnage consumers of palm oil at present. This is because palm oil has a melting point that is just slightly above room temperature, so it makes for a good base oil for things like face creams and thick lotions. C16 Biosciences initially started the company because of the deforestation in the Amazon and equatorial Africa that is devastating the old growth rainforests in the tropics. In other words, they are a company that was founded in an effort to help save the atmosphere and biosphere of the planet.
Another company in the UK, the Clean Food Group (4), has also pioneered the production of oils and fats using precision fermentation. They have focused on palm oil to start with for the reasons that I outlines at the start of this post, namely because there is a ready market for a palm oil substitute in the cosmetics industry. And while the UK still has a problem with GMO foods, as does all of Western Europe, and the US for that matter, they are also working the regulatory system in the UK to get approval to put their product into the processed food industry there. They do not have their product scaled up as much as C16 Biosciences yet, but they did close $2.5M in venture funding recently to scale it up, so they are well on their way.
So, maybe, just maybe, the composite material fiber and resin manufacturers will take notice of this development and start their own process for creating and manufacturing completely sustainable and high quality composite resins and potentially even carbon and other organic fibers. One can only hope.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. And of course I welcome a conversation about precision fermentation and what is possible using this technology. My first degree (first love?) is actually biology, which is where I get the organic chemistry background.
I also wanted to let everyone know again that I have finished the first draft of my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. As of this week I’m also going to add a section about precision fermentation to the book, so it will be in there when it goes to McFarland. My ingoing title is “Close the Circle, a Roadmap to Composite Materials Sustainability”. I am almost at the finish line in preparing the manuscript along with all of the figures, etc. in the manner that McFarland needs to have it to produce the book. I’m going to try to get that done by the end of this year, so the book will most likely come out late next summer or early fall next year.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August, and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
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